ORIGIN

eBay Project Car Update #2: Crimes Against Humanity

Here it is. We just installed our extra-deep Center Lines so we are already finished.

… just kidding! Sorry, we couldn’t wait until April 1st.

We are actually just getting started, but discoveries made this week lead us to believe that the different Corvette shown below might be something like what ours used to look like. In disassembling the car we think we have uncovered two red paint jobs, another light metallic blue coat before that, and then finally the factory Ermine White underneath the edges of the dash, which had never been out of the car. Digging this deep you are bound to discover some stories, and we are happy that we are going to be able to set a few of them right during the course of this build. Check out the latest details below, including the Myron Vernis Ceremonial White Gauge Tear-Down.

We have the car almost stripped for paint, and have learned a good deal along the way. We know that the rear of the car was replaced with reproduction bodywork at some point fairly recently, but the fuel filler seat that rides atop the tank looks plenty old. We found a good amount of light metallic blue paint on the seal, as shown below. It is pretty unlikely that it would have been swapped in from another car, so we are now convinced that the car was blue at one point. Maybe with Grand Sport cues like the car above?

The car is said to have been flared, and we can also tell via some remnants of mounts on the frame and the torched off rocker panel trim supports, that it also had some burly side pipes installed at one point. We are still on the fence about rear-exiting or side-exiting exhaust, but either way the factory rocker trim will be used. We just picked up the proper trim brackets here on eBay. Nice masking job they did on the trim and the frame, too, huh? A black frame is going to look so nice!

We now have the dash totally gutted. Reading up in the restoration manual we bought on a BaT reader suggestion in the comments when we introduced the project, the paint beneath the outer riveted ends of the dash is body color on these cars, as the dash on 63’s was installed after paint (not true of the later C2’s). So when we drilled out those rivets and popped out the dash, voila! The factory Ermine White paint was under there. That felt good, and after we shredded ours we even found that the unusual black rivets to put it back together were available (you guessed it!) here on eBay, so we grabbed them..

The rules remain that all the parts have to come from eBay, and here are some more substantial items that we have picked up since the last feature:

We’re out of time for tonight, so we’ll have to update you on the gauge work tomorrow. We’ll leave you with this teaser shot and this auction that we won to let you guess how we might be proceeding…

The eBay Project Car is a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette that was purchased on eBay by BaT, and will be sorted and eventually sold at auction on eBay. This is the first car on Bring a Trailer sponsored exclusively by eBay, and more details on the project can be found here in the Project Overview Page and here in the project update features!